A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reads a growing manufacturer's second factory as a replication experiment, and follows eleven years of a company deciding whether it had succeeded.
The papers of one sauce company show a tasting bench rejecting the original works' bottles once the labels came off
A company that opens a second factory tells its customers that nothing has changed. How the company itself would come to know this is the question behind The Same Sauce Twice: A Branch Works as a Replication Experiment, a paper by Mr Eivind Onwuka, Doctoral Candidate in the School of Continuous Improvement, published today.
The paper engages the deposited records of a single unnamed table-sauce manufacturer and aligns them with a long-standing conversation in the philosophy of experiment about what it means to do the same thing twice. At its centre is a daily tasting bench at which staff of the original works passed judgement on bottles from the new one. When a works chemist arranged for the bottles to be tasted unlabelled, the bench declared the original works’ own sauce “not ours” in 71 of 412 pairs.
I went to the papers expecting them to tell me which of the two works had been right. They declined, at some length, and I have come to think the School was generous in regarding that as a result.
— Mr Eivind Onwuka, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement
The University counts work of this kind among the reasons it maintains a doctoral program, and notes with satisfaction that a candidate of the School has carried its interest in sameness into a cellar.
The paper proposes that a growing firm may acquire its original only after it has made a copy, and is careful to rest the proposal on one company’s letter-books and no more. It offers no guidance to manufacturers.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6nii9t.